Testing private server using multiple connexions - bash

In my company, I have have to test if a server is responding correctly.
The main test is to ask people (form the company) to connect simultaneously to the server at the same time.
I want to automate this procedure and doing it with one computer. My idea is to make a script that add several ip adresses to my PC and send a ping with all of them to the server.
Is it something doable ? Or maybe is there a better way to do that ?

Sure its do able in bash but there are many opensource tools which let you perform more complex operations right out of the box so get useful result quicker. I used Tsung in a similar situation and was able to investigate the systems response to varying the rate of adding connection more easily than if i was using bash. It was also easier to massively parallelise threads to simulate hundreds of users.

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Sending Multiple Sitemap Pings

I'm implementing a sitemap which will be generated based on an event, which I'd like to ping Google with. The issue is that the sitemap will be separately generated on two production machines behind a load balancer. This will work fine, and the two will both generate their sitemaps at roughly the same time.
While I'm well aware that ideally this would run in some sort of other process that would run separately from the individual production machines, that's currently not possible due to other architectural requirements. I've suggested the client invest in a solution to this problem, that will not be complete within the timeframe I have for this.
I would expect that Google would receive the two pings and de-duplicate them, and read the sitemap after some number of seconds after the ping. This would be fine, as both sitemaps would likely be generated by that time.
My options, then, are like this:
Configure only one of the servers to submit the ping - I'm not a huge fan of this approach, as it leads to configuration differences on the two machines.
Hope for the best - assuming that Google will de-duplicate the pings and run the request some time after receiving the ping, this would be fine.
Does anyone have experience with this sort of situation?
Your plan is not the recommended way to go if you want to notify Google about new pages. Implement a RSS feed and submit it to https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/. Update the feed with your new pages when necessary.
More info: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/fdD4ZSk9tPw

ruby scrape with multiple ip addresses

I would like to know if it is possible for a Ruby program to possess multiple IP addresses? I am trying to download a lot of data from a site, but it is very slow with only 1 connection at a time.
I intend to multi-thread my program with each thread using its own IP address, but I do not know if it is possible in the first place, any help or hints would be greatly appreciated.
It is definitely possible for a machine or a program to have multiple IP addresses. You can even have multiple network adapters, and tie each of them to different physical connections.
However, it can get really hairy to maintain. The challenge for that is partly in the code, partly in the system maintenance, and partly in the networking required to make that happen.
A better approach that you can take is to design your program so that it can run distributed. As such, you can have several copies of it synchronized and doing the work in parallel. You can then scale it horizontally (build more copies) as required, and over different machines and connections if required.
EDIT: You mentioned that you cannot scale horizontally, and that you prefer to use multiple connections from the same machine.
It's very likely that for this you'll have to go a little bit lower in the network stack, developing yourself the connection through sockets in order to use specific network interfaces.
Check out an introduction to Ruby sockets.
Also, check out these related questions:
How does a socket know which network interface controller to use?
Binding to networking interfaces in ruby
Ruby: Binding a listening socket to a specific interface
Can I make ruby send network traffic over a specific iface?

Is it possible to hide the IP address in a PHP connection?

Long story short, I'm wanting to test my site's anti-bot systems ("bot" here referring to players of the game cheating with programs, not spiders etc.).
I've written my own bot using PHP's CLI. Most of the time, my site is able to detect the bot activity and block it.
However I need to test dealing with dynamic IPs, and since I have a static one this is no easy task as far as I can tell. There are other things I'd like to be able to test that involve multiple IPs.
So, bottom line, is it possible to hide/change the IP address seen by the server when my PHP script connects to it and, if so, how do I do it? (I've never really used proxies before so I don't know much about them).
you can write a test code which does substitute $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] at the very beginning of your script and do whatever tests you like.
No, IP is the one of the few things client can't camouflage.
You can definitely use Proxy severs. There are many open proxy servers that are available, but those are not reliable and slow. You can use the paid proxy solutions, something like this proxy.lc

What have you used to test (functional/load/stress) your network service with its custom protocol?

I recently created a turn-based game server that can accept 10s of thousands of simultaneous client connections (long story short - epoll on Linux). Communication is based on a simple, custom, line-based protocol. This server allows clients to connect, seek for other players in game matches, play said games (send moves, chat messages, etc.), and be notified when the game has ended.
What I'm looking to do now is test the server by simulating client connections. I'm hoping to support 10s of thousands of simultaneous connections, so this testing is very important to me. What do you guys use for your own testing?
Some things I'm researching now are: pexpect (python expect lib for the functional testing) and tsung for load testing.
I'd like to be able to just test from my laptop since I do not have a cluster of client machines to connect from. Perhaps I'd need to use ip aliasing or some-such in order to generate 100s of thousands of outbound sockets (limit is 65K per interface AFAIK).
Anyway, it seems to me like I need something fairly custom but I thought I'd ask before I went down that path.
Thanks!
I've used JMeter with custom sampler and assertion components before to do automated regression/load testing for a banking application with a custom protocol (Java RMI based API).
It's not exactly lightweight though, and you'll end up doing a lot of extra coding in the JMeter components to support your custom protocol. I'm guessing you'd have to code your own Java socket based client in this case.
But it gives you a lot of flexibility in defining the logic for testing the components, so you can do whatever you want inside there. It scales nicely as well, and allows you to throw a lot of concurrent connections at the system under test.
I decided it was best to "roll my own" to start with.
We are using HP LoadRunner it's the state of the art load testing product. (But also an expensive one). It can simulate thousands of requests to the server and provides metrics on response time etc..

bandwidth and traffic simulator for web apps?

Can you suggest how to create a test environment to simulate various types of bandwidths and traffic in a web app?
Or maybe an open source program which does this against localhost?
I think this is a very important subject when programming web apps but it is not a usual topic, the only way i can imagine to create such kind of environment is to use some kind of proxy in a local network but before start looking into the squid documentation i would like to hear your suggestions.
if you're using apache you may want to take a look at apache ab
There are two approaches to shape network traffic to simulate a network link:
Run some software on the client or server that sits somewhere in the networking stack and shapes the traffic between the app and the network interface
Run the traffic shaping software on a dedicated machine with 2 network interfaces through which your traffic is routed
(2) is a better solution if you don't want to install software on the client or server (and possibly impact performance), but requires more hardware fiddling.
Some other features you might want to think about are what shaping parameters can be simulated. Most do delay and packet loss, some do jitter and bandwidth limiting as well. Some solutions can selectively filter traffic (for instance by port number, TCP or UDP etc).
Here is a list of some of the systems I've found:
Open Source or Freeware
DummyNet is an open source BSD Unix-based for dedicated devices. It is not clear if the software is being actively maintained
NistNet is an open source Linux-based system for dedicated devices. The software has not been actively maintained for several years.
Commercial
Apposite Technoligies sell dedicated hardware solutions for simulating WAN links, with a Web based GUI for configuring the settings and collecting traffic measurements
East Coast DataCom sell hardware dedicated simulators for simulating routers and modems
Itrinegy offer both dedicated device solutions, and solutions for running on clients or servers.
Network FX offer several dedicated device products for simulating network impairments between the client & server
NetLimiter is a client side system that allows throttling of individual applications, and includes a firewall.
Shunra Software offer a range of products, from high end enterprise WAN simulation and testing, to a simple client-resident emulator.
The closest I can think of is doing something similar with VEDekstop from Shunra..
Simulating High Latency and Low Bandwidth in Testing of Database Applications
Shunra VE Desktop Standard is a Windows-based client software solution that simulates a wide area network link so that you can test applications under a variety of current and potential network conditions – directly from your desktop.
I wrote a php script awhile back which used CURL to run a sequence of page requests against my server which represented a typical use scenario. I had it output the times that it took for the server to respond to each of the requests. I then had another script which spawned a bunch of these test case scripts simultaneously for a sustained period and correlated the results into a file which I could then look at in a spreadsheet to see average times. This way I could simulate the number of users hitting the site that I wanted. The limitations are that you need to run the test script on a different server to the web server and that the client machine can become too loaded to give meaningful results past a certain point. I've since left the job otherwise I would paste the scripts here.
If you are running a Linux box as your server, Linux box as your client, or have the capability to put (perhaps a VM) a Linux router between your client and server, you can use NetEm.
NetEm is a Linux TC (Traffic Control) discipline which can delay (i.e. add latency) packets leaving a host. Although it's tricky to set up clever rules (e.g. add latency to some traffic, not to others), it's easy to add a simple "delay everything leaving the interface by 50ms" type rules and some recipes are provided.
By sticking a Linux VM between your client and server, you can simulate as much latency as you like. And you can turn it on and off dynamically. Linux has other TC disciplines which can be combined with NetEm to restrict bandwidth (but the script to set this up can be somewhat complicated). NetEm can also randomly drop packets.
I use it and it works a treat :)
Web Application Stress Tool (WAST) from Microsoft is what you need.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e2c0585a-062a-439e-a67d-75a89aa36495&displaylang=en
I haven't used it for years (lack of need, not because I'd found anything else), but xat webspeed would be the first thing I would point toward
As other people have mentioned, Apache's ab (comes with Apache, so you probably have it already) is good.
Other good options are:
HP's LoadRunner Apache
Jakarta's JMeter
Tsung (if you want to get your erlang on)
I personally like ab and JMeter the best.
We use Loadrunner to do bandwidth and traffic simulation in our App. Loadrunner is can start agents on various machines and you can simulate one machine as running on dialup modem v/s another on DSL v/s another on Cable internet.
We also use Loadrunner to simulate various kinds of traffic conditions from 10 user run to 500 user run. We can also insert think times in the script and simulate a real user executing the http request. The best part is that it comes with a recording studio where it will plug in with Internet explorer and you can record the whole scenario/Usecase that can be as simple as hitting one page to a full blown 50-60 page script or more.
i found this little java program that works great : sloppy
yet not a proffesional solution but it works for simple tests, i guess it uses java streams and buffers to slow down the connection .
Have you looked at Tsung? It's a great utility for seeing if your website will scale in event of attack, I mean massive popularity. We use it for our web frontend, and our internal systems too.
If you're interested in performing your tests out of your browser, there is also a really great Firefox plug-in.
Do not forget about Wanulator (http://www.wanulator.de/).
The name Wanulator comes from "WAN" and "simulator. This pretty much describes what the software does: It simulates different Internet conditions such as delay or packet loss. Furthermore it simulates user access line speeds e.g. modem, ISDN or ADSL.
Wanulator is currently packaged as a Linux boot CD based on SLAX. This will give you a full out of the box experience. You can turn any PC into a test-system within a blink - just by booting the Wanulator CD. The package already includes useful client SW such as web-browser and network sniffer (Wireshark). Nevertheless if the PC has 2 network interfaces the system can run as an intermediate system between your server and your client - as a switch - without any configuration hassles.

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